THE NEW YORKER rotten husband!" is something of an understatement. Our feelings change only after Shou-yu, toward the end of his life, apologizes for his devotion to the Party at the expense of his family, and confides to his sons that he doubts whether his life of dedication has re- ally helped build a better China. Even then, though, he finds himself unable to compromise his principles: when the author asks him to put in a word with his friends on the enrollment commit- tee to help her get into the university in Sichuan, he refuses, saying, "It would not be fair to people with no power." We come to know Shou-yu as a daughter knows a parent, and in the end we see him as a tragic archetype- an idealist whose ideal betrays him. Luckily for the Changs, De-hong was more realistic. She worked the bureau- cracy on behalf of her children and on behalf of the children of anyone who asked her help. Ms. Chang was admit- ted to the university, and resumed the study of English she had begun in middle school; in 1978, she won a scholarship to Great Britain, where she received a doctorate in linguistics, and has lived there ever since. Though the settings in Chang's book are exotic, the people aren't strange. Before the First World War, the list of ladylike accomplishments was the same in Manchuria as in Massachu- setts, and the Chengdu street gang knew exactly what a street gang is supposed to do without ever having seen "West Side Story." The author's oldest brother, who became a physicist, was the same kind of child as my physicist brother. In traditional Asian patriarchal extended families, as in our own, a rich widower's grown children find ways to express their resentment at their father's remarriage; and many a Western mother has shared Yu-fang's dismay when, like De-hong, her daughter decides to marry without a traditional ceremony, feast, gown, and trousseau. The aspirations of the suc- cessive generations of women in this book parallel those of the same gen- erations of Western women: Yu-fang, born in 1909, wanted to become a respected wife and mother; her daugh- ter, born in 1931, hoped for a career but felt she ought to choose a nurturing profession and, since circumstances prevented her from studying medicine, turned her political job into social work; the author, born in 1952, took it for granted that women had jobs, and became a scholar. It isn't that the Changs became "modern" and less Chinese. They're both. Dr. Xia practiced traditional Chi- nese medicine, but the family also used Western medicine. They didn't stop reading Chinese literature after they began reading Western books: they recognized trans- or supranational re- alities in the doings of Emma Bovary and Jo March, just as, reading Ms. Chang, we recognize small human crises (a first meeting between mother- and daughter-in-law) and small hu- man pleasures (a family Sunday in the park). The author's own candor and sense of humor keep everything in proportion. She never whines, preaches, argues, or makes public-policy recom- mendations. She just tells stories. Of course, we feel how suffocating it is to live in a country where it isn't possible to tell a policeman or a soldier to go away or a bureaucrat to mind his own business, and we observe that the ret- rograde tyrannies in this book all find ways to belittle or exploit women. Misgovernment and the oppression of women aren't the only-or even the . h " W . ld S ". maln-t emes. 1 wans IS a narrative exploration of one of human- kind's few benign irrationalities- mother love. While Dr. Xia appreci- ated Shou -yu' s nobility of character, Yu-fang objected to almost everything about her daughter's marriage; yet, though De-hong disappointed her, Yu- fang kept on loving her. De-hong took her mother's ineradicable devotion as her due, the way we used to take fresh air and clean water, and then dupli- cated her mother's devotion with her own children. As Ms. Chang follows her grandmother, her mother, and her brothers and sister through the decades, we see mother love's variety, nuance, and stubbornness-how it survives sepa- ration, coexists with disapproval or incomprehension, and evokes wholly unself-conscious self-sacrifice, even ( or especially) on behalf of rebellious or defiant children. 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